WHATS NEW IN Samba 3.0 alpha0 ============================= This is a pre-release of Samba 3.0 alpha0. This is NOT a stable release. Use at your own risk. The purpose of this alpha release is to get wider testing of the major new pieces of code in the current Samba 3.0 development tree. We are planning on ceasing development on the 2.2.x release of Samba very shortly and after that we will be concentrating on Samba 3.0. To reduce the time before the final Samba 3.0 release we need as many poeple as possible to start testing these alpha releases, and hopefully giving us some high quality feedback on what needs fixing. Note that Samba 3.0 is not anywhere near feature complete yet. There is a lot more coding we have planned, but unless we get what we have done already more widely tested we will have a hard time doing a stable release in a reasonable time frame. This release is also missing major pieces of documentation, and there are many parts of the docs that have not been updated to reflect the new options and features in 3.0. Major new features: ------------------- - Active Directory support. This release is able to join a ADS realm as a member server and authenticate users using LDAP/kerberos. Please read ADS-HOWTO.txt in the release for a very rough guide on how to set this up. - Unicode support. Samba will now negotiate unicode on the wire and interally there is now a much better infrastructure for multi-byte and unicode character sets. You may need the "dos charset", "unix charset" and "display charset" options. The unicode support is not yet documented. - New authentication system. The internal authentication system has been almost completely rewritten. Most of the changes are internal, but the new auth system is also very configurable. Not documented yet. - new filename mangling system. The filename mangling system has been completely rewritten. An internal database now stores mangling maps persistantly. This needs lots of testing. - new "net" command. A new "net" command has been added. It is somewhat similar to the "net" command in windows. Eventually we plan to replace a bunch of other utilities (such as smbpasswd) with subcommands in "net", at the moment only a few things are implemented. - Samba now negotiates NT-style status32 codes on the wire. This improves error handling a lot. - better w2k printing support. The support for printing from win2000 clients has improved greatly. Plus lots of other changes! Note that many new features are not documented. Don't let this stop you from using Samba 3.0. It is particularly important that the basic file/print serving abilities of Samba 3.0 are widely tested to ensure that we have not broken any of the basic functionality. As we do more alpha releases we will start to document the new features. Reporting bugs & Development Discussion --------------------------------------- Please discuss this release on the samba-technical mailing list or by joining the #samba-technical IRC channel on irc.openprojects.net If you do report problems then please try to send high quality feedback. If you don't provide vital information to help us track down the problem then you will probably be ignored.